Market dispatch·Paris
€5–7M each: a never-at-auction Joan Mitchell and a Nazi-looted, restituted Renoir lead Christie's €100M Paris Art Week sales
Christie's Paris will stage four auctions across 22–23 October during Art Basel Paris week, anchored by the 20th/21st Century Evening Sale. A Joan Mitchell unseen at auction before and Amedeo Modigliani's Minoutcha each carry €5–7 million estimates, while a Nazi-confiscated Renoir returns to the block after a restitution agreement.
Christie's has lined up what it bills as one of its most ambitious Paris seasons: four auctions on 22 and 23 October, timed to coincide with the fifth edition of Art Basel Paris, with a combined estimate of more than €100 million. The centrepiece is the 20th/21st Century: Paris Evening Sale including Thinking Italian on 22 October, built around four landmark consignments — the family collection of Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, the estate of Antonio Homem Sonnabend, works from the Marlene and Spencer Hays collection, and the Radiant Modernism collection.
The evening sale's headline lots are two €5–7 million paintings. Joan Mitchell's Sans titre, painted around 1957 when the artist was in her early thirties and already exhibiting alongside de Kooning and Pollock, has never been offered at auction before, according to the house's specialists. It shares top billing with Amedeo Modigliani's Minoutcha (1916–17), a portrait of an unknown Montparnasse sitter whose blank, mask-like eyes reflect the artist's encounter with African sculpture.
The season's strongest narrative belongs to Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Le Cap d'Antibes (1916), painted at the artist's Riviera home Les Collettes. The work was bought in the 1920s by the Jewish banker and collector Jakob Goldschmidt, who fled Germany in 1933; it was confiscated and sold in Berlin on the Reich's orders in 1941. It now returns to auction following a restitution agreement with Goldschmidt's heirs, and leads the separate Durand-Ruel, Generations of Vision sale on 22 October.
Design collectors get a rarity: Carlo Mollino's 'Arabesque' table (c. 1950–51), one of fewer than a dozen examples — others are in the V&A and the Brooklyn Museum — formerly owned by Mollino scholar Giovanni Brino and Swiss dealer Thomas Ammann. Jean Dubuffet's coal-residue sculptures Le Commandeur and Le Reître (1954) come from the collection of Ileana Sonnabend's heir, while Claude Lalanne's monumental Lit 'Singerie' bed, commissioned in 1997 by Parisian socialite Florence Grinda, rounds out the highlights. Exhibitions have been open to the public near the Grand Palais since 16 October.
